Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

by Alastair Bonnett

  Whatever the success or failure of this latest initiative, it has shown beyond doubt that the FARC, and organizations like it, set enormous store in possessing place. It is the fight for it that defines them. What differentiates them from terrorists and makes them genuine revolutionaries is that they are bound to place. Most modern terrorism, by contrast, is placeless; it thrives in an uprooted world. The problem for the FARC guerrillas is that their geographical ambition has come to outweigh all others. They hang on to place so tightly that they have squeezed the life from it.

  Hobyo

  5° 20′ 59″ N, 48° 31′ 36″ E

  Hobyo has seen better days. An ancient town on the western coast of the Horn of Africa, it prospered for many centuries thanks to the Indian Ocean’s busy shipping lanes. A hundred years ago it was the capital of a small sultanate and a lively commercial center, drawing in traders in precious metals and pearls. Today it is a pirate town that is avoided by the rest of the world. But it’s at night when Hobyo really disappears from the map. For in a town where a single hijacked vessel can make more than $9 million, it’s surprising to learn that no one has invested in an electricity generator. Nighttime satellite images show Hobyo as an inky nothing. It’s a place that sees a lot of money but is dirt poor, since both the economy and the identity of the town have been hollowed out by brigandry.

  In the 2000s there were plenty of pirate towns up and down this coast, but Hobyo was one of the most secure. When they were beaten back by Islamists in the south or the marine police in the north, the pirates came to Hobyo, sometimes bringing their booty with them. As a result, Hobyo is as good an example as any of a “feral city.” It’s a term that is used in military circles to describe regions that have no effective government but sustain an internationally networked criminal economy. Feral cities are the ragged end of spaces of exception: they are not the product of governments or ideologies but show what happens when such structures fall away. According to Richard Norton, writing in the Naval War College Review, feral cities have “lost the ability to maintain the rule of law,” yet they remain “a functioning actor in the greater international system.” Norton throws his net wide, arguing that Mexico City, São Paulo, and Johannesburg have entrenched feral characteristics and may be well on their way to becoming feral cities.

  These cities may be partly feral, but Hobyo is almost entirely so. Somalia has had no effective central government since its 1991 civil war, and although it lies within the Somali province of Galmudug and has its own mayor, Hobyo has been in the hands of pirates for over a decade. Its remote coastal location makes it one of their prize possessions. Planted a mile off Hobyo’s coast lies the pirates’ hoard. “This one is bigger than Hobyo,” gloated one young pirate to a visiting French journalist, Jean-Marc Mojon, pointing offshore to a hijacked Korean supertanker that was soon to net his comrades millions of dollars. Meanwhile, pirating has spawned a secondary industry, with small fishing boats taking supplies from Hobyo to the stolen vessels. Satellite images show that the town is dotted with heavily walled pirate compounds, their courtyards lined with vehicles. The town’s most prominent feature is a telecommunications tower, which is used by the pirates to communicate with hijacked ships anchored off the coast.

  In recent years the total paid over to Somali pirates has been between $150 million and $200 million per annum. The size of this figure comes more clearly into relief when put alongside Somalia’s GDP per capita, which is $300. All of which makes you wonder where all that ransom cash goes. Not to Hobyo, that much is certain. It ends up abroad or someplace far inland. Pirates aside, Hobyo is a dusty, low-rise, crumbling town fighting a losing battle against the encroaching desert. Other interviews by Jean-Marc Mojon with the residents paint a bleak picture of a place emptied of hope or purpose. A local elder complains that “we have no schools, no farming, no fishing—it’s ground zero here.” The idea that piracy should be reaping benefits for Hobyo doesn’t appear to have occurred to him. Instead, he worries about the desert: “our most pressing concern is the sand, the city is disappearing, we are being buried alive and can’t resist.”

  Hobyo’s pirate bosses offer what has become a standard justification for their trade: foreign vessels came into our waters and stole all our fish, forcing us into piracy. But most serious analysts don’t buy the idea that the pirates would much rather be fishing. While it is clear that illegal foreign fishing in the early 1990s did first provoke local fishermen to arm themselves and defend their waters, thus forming the nucleus of the pirate fleets, evidence collected by the Norwegian expert Stig Jarle Hansen suggests that fish stocks remain viable. The scale of the switch from fishing to piracy is better understood as an economic and social choice. In a poverty-stricken country the quick and vast financial rewards of piracy were too tempting to resist. The story of the most famous Somali pirate, Mohamed Abdi Hassan, known as Afweyne (“Big Mouth”), who is based in Hobyo, is a story of entrepreneurial zeal. Afweyne was a former civil servant who took to piracy because it was a good business opportunity. In the absence of other ways of making serious money or a state willing or able to stop him, he began recruiting sponsors. One potential candidate, interviewed by Stig Jarle Hansen, ruefully remarked that “Afweyne started up in 2003. He asked me to invest $2,000, as he was gathering money for his new business venture . . . I did not invest and I regret it so much today.” Afweyne traveled to more established pirate towns up the coast in Puntland on recruiting trips, headhunting men with the best reputations, and he quickly became the driving personality and business brain that turned what had been an amateurish, small-scale phenomenon into a well-financed, well-equipped operation run by professionals. Afweyne also played an important role in the opening of a pirate stock exchange. Based in the nearby town of Harardhere, it allows investors to buy shares in various pirate outfits and in particular attacks on high-value targets.

  The pirates have stamped their authority and their image on Hobyo, transforming it from a port city with a complex and rich heritage into a caricature of lawless greed. It is not a good advertisement for how places cope in the absence of government. This is a point worth making because, according to one study by Professor Peter Leeson, a global authority on the economic impact of piracy, across a range of development indicators Somalia under anarchy has done better than its neighbors under bad government. Leeson also speaks enthusiastically about “the substantial increase in personal freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by Somalis since the emergence of anarchy.”

  It’s true that pirate towns of the past were often claimed to be relatively well-off and to allow a certain rough liberty. One of the reasons that Port Royal, the pirate haven in Jamaica that flourished in the seventeenth century, was protected by the island’s governor was that it generated more wealth than could be expected from plantations. It seems that it was only when the pirates of Port Royal starting targeting local trading vessels that attitudes began to turn hostile. Port Royal was small compared to Canton in China. The pirate fleet based in Canton in the early nineteenth century comprised about four hundred junks and sixty thousand men. It was the economy. In the past there appears to have been some ill-defined tipping point at which such “feral” activity becomes dominant and everyone in some way becomes dependent upon its success. Yet today riches rarely stay where they are made. Professor Leeson’s optimistic scenario of Somalia’s ungoverned liberty comes unstuck in Hobyo. It’s poor, decaying, and at the mercy of warring gangs of bandits. Although the sudden loss of piracy would probably hit some local people’s pockets, Hobyo is merely a funnel for money extracted from foreign ship owners and passed on to Somali financiers who, according to Somali news reports, live in “beautiful buildings in Nairobi and Dubai” that are known as “pirates’ buildings.”

  Being a feral city provides rich pickings for some, but it eviscerates the life of a place, and, moreover, it is a boom-and-bust existence. Hobyo was lost to Islamists in 2006, who were ousted six months later by Ethiopian troops supporting the
regional government. The Islamists returned in 2009 and began to make life difficult for the pirates, although others accuse them of just demanding a large slice of the takings. More important, since 2011 Hobyo’s pirates have also come up against better-defended commercial vessels and an international effort to destroy pirate bases, and as a result the number of ships taken hostage has fallen steeply. Hobyo’s beleaguered mayor, Ali Duale Kahiye, feels that he might be getting his town back. Talking to journalists in 2012, he argued that “the decline of piracy is a much-needed boon for our region. They were the machines causing inflation, indecency and insecurity in the town. Life and culture is good without them.” The regional government is talking up grand schemes to build a harbor and reintegrate Hobyo with the legitimate economy.

  It would appear that the days of unfettered piracy are coming to an end. Afweyne recently announced his retirement from the business. The pirate towns of Somalia are more likely to be remembered as alarming exceptions than as harbingers of a new world disorder. Feral places are collapsing places, warred over, exploited, and weak. Hobyo’s pirates could have been brought to heel many years ago if other governments had considered the town’s fate important enough. Although the determination of individual pirates and the extraordinary rewards of their trade go a long way to explain Hobyo’s pirate years, places only stay feral because they have been cast adrift by an indifferent world.

  The absence of normality in spaces of exception makes them vulnerable: they often appear to be outlandish and inherently outside the spirit, if not the practice, of the law. Yet many established states and institutions started out this way. The struggle to make the transition from being seen as exceptional to acceptance and normalcy connects many of the places we encounter in the next section.

  Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog

  51° 26′ 20″ N, 4° 55′ 56″ E

  I don’t have an easy relationship with borders. They frighten and unnerve me. Searched, prodded, delayed; again and again, for the temerity of crossing a few feet of land, they are bureaucratic fault lines, imperious and unfriendly. It’s not surprising that so many look forward to a world without borders. Their existence is routinely critiqued by academic geographers who cast them as hostile acts of exclusion. And yet where, in a borderless world, could we escape to? Where would it be worth going?

  The possibility of new sovereign places depends on the creation of new borders but also provokes questions about their meaning and consequences, both in the embryonic ethnic nations of the world and in much smaller and quixotic stabs at autonomy. But the problems and pleasures of borders can also be witnessed in the fate of national enclaves, some of which suffer from a surfeit of bordering while others appear to relish it. For borders are far more than lines of exclusion—their profusion reflects the varied nature of people’s political and cultural choices. The paradox of borders is that they close down free movement yet suggest a world of choices and possibility.

  For all their faults, there is something exciting about the way borders snake over the land, about their power to impose ideas and history upon the dumb earth. Perhaps this is what Frank Jacobs, whose “Borderlines” column in the New York Times excavated a rich seam of cartographic curiosities, was getting at when he spoke of his sense of loss at the disappearance of borders. It’s a syndrome Jacobs calls “Phantom Border Sadness,” which he defines as “a slight pang of grief caused by the conviction that a world with one less border is also a bit less special.” In an era in which we are constantly urged to pull down the barriers that separate us, it is a dangerous thought. Yet Jacobs’s eccentric nostalgia feels oddly humane, for it acknowledges some things that are rarely acknowledged: that people like creating borders, that they are not just frustrated by them but also thrilled and inspired.

  Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog are two villages that sit within and alongside each other. There are 22 bits of Belgium (Baarle-Hertog, population 2,306) scattered in odd profusion inside the Netherlands, within and around the Dutch town of Baarle-Nassau (population 6,668), and 8 parts of Baarle-Nassau that sit inside these Belgic fragments. Some are block-shaped but others are spindly creatures that sport long and crooked tentacles. The largest enclave in Baarle is 1.54 square kilometers, and the smallest, an empty field, is 2,632 square meters. Of the world’s 260 enclaves, about 12 percent exist in and around Baarle.

  The profusion of these borders means that when visitors walk around Baarle they can never be quite sure which country they are in. It’s hard not to conclude that these two places share the same space. This was certainly my experience, on the wet September day I went to Baarle, even though I was being guided by the municipalities’ fractal town map. While some of the borders are marked, by white painted crosses on the pavement, there are just too many to make it practical to create signage for them all. On one 160-meter stretch of Kapelstraat, where visitors leave one large Belgian enclave only to pass through the borders of two nearby rectangular Belgium slivers, I was able to walk in a straight line across five national borders in under a minute.

  Baarle is a friendly, workaday sort of place, and the residents take an unostentatious pride in being the world’s only significant remnant of medieval border problems. Almost everywhere else borders have been straightened and rationalized, anomalies have been dealt with and forgotten about. The origins of the Baarle mix-up come from a time when enclaves were regularly thrown up across Europe as a result of the complexity and fluidity of local aristocratic domains and territorial claims. One exasperated eighteenth-century description of the French territory of Lorraine describes it as “mixed, crossed, and filled with foreign territories and enclaves belonging with full sovereignty to the princes and states of Germany.” As a result, premodern maps were scribbled with borders. What this quote also shows is that, by the eighteenth century, enclaves were being seen as a problem. France applied delimitation treaties and old-fashioned conquest to eradicate many of them. The rational world of the Enlightenment tried to sponge away the dark and unmanageable world of enclaves. It left us with the view we have of them today, as oddities that somehow both demonstrate and escape the logic of the nation-state.

  That Baarle survived is little more than good fortune. After an exhaustive examination of every last marriage, divorce, covenant, and claim behind the Baarle enclaves, the preeminent expert on the topic, Professor Brendan Whyte, simply shrugged his shoulders. Baarle’s “integration into Napoleonic France,” he tells us, “could easily have resulted in the rationalization of the enclaves at Baarle, as had been the case for most enclaves along France’s northern and eastern borders,” but “for some reason,” this didn’t happen.

  Baarle is an exception, never important or irksome enough to get to the top of anyone’s to-do list. Having survived, it now provides us with a living laboratory of medieval micro-borders. In 1959 the Belgian cattle dealer Sooy Van den Eynde challenged the Dutch town of Baarle-Nassau over its title to what he claimed was historically Belgian land. His case went to the International Court at The Hague, which ruled in his favor. As a result, a new Belgian enclave of about twelve hectares was created. In 1995 a border commission, after fifteen years of work, proclaimed that the Baarle borders were now known and fixed. However, the logic of fragmentation cannot be so easily tamed. In Baarle the incentive to find novel ways of complicating an already complex situation has taken on new life, which may feed an endless desire to define and scale down the borderline. How many centimeters thick is it? What can it pass through? In Baarle the custom has been that a property belongs to the country in which its street door is located. But what if the border runs through the door? In that case, the unsatisfactory outcome has been that the two parts of the building belong in different nations. This potentially tricky situation hasn’t tended to last long in Baarle because of another local custom, namely, that tax is paid to the country where one’s front door is. Not surprisingly, residents living on Baarle’s numerous borderlines moved their front doors, shifting them a few feet to t
he cheaper country.

  Door-shunting has died out over recent years but its memory is kept alive, along with a variety of border markers, including the helpful local habit of having the national flags on house number plates. The two village councils have alighted on Baarle’s plethora of enclaves as its best chance of drawing in tourists. They are now working together to get the two towns listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. It’s a worthy bid, but I’m not sure Baarle will ever attract many visitors, for, apart from the quirkiness of the borders, there isn’t a lot to see. “You are a tourist?” exclaimed one shopkeeper with mild shock when I told her why I had come. Yet there is no mistaking the pleasure that the people in Baarle take from their borders; they don’t need tourists to remind them that they live in a cartographic legend.

  Baarle is something of a best-case scenario for other, less happy, border squabble spots. It shows us how people can use borders to build a positive sense of self without making other people’s lives a misery. Interviewed by the BBC a few years ago, the former mayor of Baarle-Nassau, Jan Hendrikx, clearly took pride in the fact that “our citizens mingle with the citizens of Baarle-Hertog, our Belgian neighbors, but not in a regular way.” His equivalent in Baarle-Hertog, Jan Van Leuven, elaborated on the point. “My head is, I think, a little Dutch, but my heart is Flemish,” he said, before concluding, “In general Dutch people are more rational. They think. They look to the north. We Flemish think also, but we are more emotional. We speak the same language but the words have a different significance.”

  It’s easy to dismiss these kinds of generalizations, especially when Baarle’s borders have been made harmless by both Belgium and the Netherlands being in the European Union. When Frank Jacobs had the gall to write in praise of borders for the New York Times he received a severe scolding from some of his readers. Didn’t he know that “borders are for small minds which exploit fear and ignorance, and attempt to circumscribe a human species which knows no limitations?” Didn’t he understand, wrote a self-styled “professional geographer,” that professional geographers have discovered that borders are nothing more than “old-fashioned colonialism”?